NIE and Densho: The WWII Odyssey of King County's Japanese Americans

Sponsored Newspapers In Education Content | APRIL 12, 2015 3 Jackson Street, Seattle’s Japantown, just prior to World War II. Courtesy of the Seattle Buddhist Temple Archives. Tensions between the United States and Japan grew in the 1930s. In anticipation of a possible war, the U.S. government began surveillance in the Japanese American community. Although these investigations determined that Japanese Americans would present minimal security risks, the government prepared lists of Japanese community leaders to be rounded up and imprisoned in the event of war. Within hours after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 , local and federal authorities swept through Japanese American communities on the West Coast and in Hawaii, arresting people on these lists. Some 300 men from Seattle were among those detained. Mostly immigrants, these community leaders were assumed guilty by the positions they held: Buddhist and Shinto priests, Japanese language school teachers, leaders of economic and cultural organizations. Many remained interned in camps run by the army or Immigration and Naturalization Service for the duration of the war. The rest of the Japanese American community waited nervously as anti- Japanese sentiment rose in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Washington Senator Monrad C. Wallgren led an ad hoc committee of senators from western states that recommended the mass removal of Japanese Americans from California, Oregon and Washington. Tacoma Mayor Harry P. Cain was one of the only western politicians to oppose the mass removal. Although President Roosevelt’s cabinet was conflicted about the issue, proponents of exclusion won out, and the President issued Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. The order granted broad powers to military leaders to exclude both aliens and citizens from any areas they deemed necessary. General John L. DeWitt , the head of the Western Defense Command , declared all of California, the western parts of Oregon and Washington and the southern part of Arizona off limits to anyone of Japanese descent. This started the government‘s systematic removal of Japanese Americans in the spring and summer of 1942, sending them first to “ assembly centers , ” temporary detention centers built in existing facilities, then to 10 “relocation centers,” newly built long term detention facilities in isolated desert or swamp lands. By the fall of 1942, all Japanese Americans—save those in institutions such as jails or sanitariums—had been evicted from the West Coast, and moved inland. The army removed Japanese Americans neighborhood by neighborhood through a series of 108 exclusion orders such as this one. The first targeted Bainbridge Island at the end of March, and the last orders were executed in mid-August. Exclusion order displayed on Seattle’s Jackson Street in May, 1942. THE ROAD TO EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066